A Boy's Own Story

by Edmund White

  “You know,” Tom said one day, “you can stay over any time you like. Harold” – the minister’s son, my old partner at Squirrel – “warned me you’d jump me in my sleep. You gotta forgive me. It’s just I don’t go in for that weird stuff.”

  I swallowed painfully and whispered, “Nor –” I cleared my throat and said too primly, “Nor do I.”

  The medical smell, that Lysol smell of homosexuality, was staining the air again as the rubber-wheeled metal cart of drugs and disinfectant rolled silently by. I longed to open the window, to go away for an hour and come back to a room free of that odor, the smell of shame.

  I never doubted that homosexuality was a sickness; in fact, I took it as a measure of how unsparingly objective I was that I could contemplate this very sickness. But in some other part of my mind I couldn’t believe that the Lysol smell must bathe me, too, that its smell of stale coal fumes must penetrate my love for Tom. Perhaps I became so vague, so exhilarated with vagueness, precisely in order to forestall a recognition of the final term of the syllogism that begins: If one man loves another he is a homosexual; I love a man . . .

  I’d heard that boys passed through a stage of homosexuality, that this stage was normal, nearly universal – then that must be what was happening to me. A stage. A prolonged stage. Soon enough this stage would revolve, and after Tom’s bedroom vanished, on would trundle white organdy, blue ribbons, a smiling girl opening her arms . . . But that would come later. As for now, I could continue to look as long as I liked into Tom’s eyes the color of faded lapis beneath brows so blond they were visible only at the roots just to each side of his nose – a faint smudge turning gold as it thinned and sped out toward the temples.

  He was a ratty boy. He hated to shave and would let his peach fuzz go for a week or even two at a time; it grew in clumps, full on the chin, sparse along the jaw, patchy beside the deep wicks of his mouth. His chamois-cloth shirts were all missing buttons. The gaps they left were filled in with glimpses of dingy undershirt. His jockey shorts had holes in them. Around one leg a broken elastic had popped out of the cotton seam and dangled against his thigh like a gray noodle. Since he wore a single pair of shorts for days on end the front pouch would soon be stained with yellow. He got up too late to shower before school; he’d run a hand through his fine hair but could never tame that high spume of a cowlick that tossed and bobbed above him, absurdly, gallantly.

  His rattiness wore a jaunty air that redeemed everything. Faded, baggy jeans, Indian moccasins he’d owned so long the soft leather tops had taken on the shape of his toes, sunglasses repaired with Band-Aids, an ancient purple shirt bleached and aged to a dusty plum, a letter jacket with white leather sleeves and on the back white lettering against a dark blue field – these were the accoutrements of a princely pauper, a paupered prince.

  We walked beside the lake at night, a spring night. As we walked we rolled gently into each other, so that our shoulders touched with every other step. A coolness scudded in off the lake and we kept our hands in our pockets. Now Tom had leaped up onto the narrow top of a retaining wall and was scampering along it in his moccasins. Although heights terrified me I followed him. The ground on both sides fell away as we crossed a canal flowing into the lake, but I put one foot in front of the other and looked not down but at Tom’s back. I prayed to a God I didn’t believe in to preserve me. Soon enough I was beside Tom again and my pulse subsided: that dangerous crossing was a sacrifice I’d made to him. Our shoulders touched. As usual he was talking too loud and in his characteristic way, a sustained tenor uh as he collected his thoughts, then a chuckle and a rapid, throw-away sentence that came almost as an anticlimax. Since Tom was the most popular boy at school, many guys had imitated his halting, then rushing way of talking (as well as his grungy clothes and haphazard grooming). But I never wanted to be Tom. I wanted Tom to be Tom for me. I wanted him to hold his reedy, sinewy, scruffy maleness in trust for us both.

  We were heading toward a concrete pier wide enough for a truck to run down. At the far end people were fishing for smelt, illegal lanterns drawing silver schools into nets. We ambled out and watched the lights play over that dripping, squirming ore being extracted from the lake’s mines. A net was dumped at my feet and I saw that cold life arc, panic, die. Tommy knew one of the old guys, who gave us a couple dozen fish, which we took back to the Wellingtons’ place.

  At midnight everyone was in bed, but Tom decided we were hungry and had to fry up our smelt right now. The odor of burning butter and bitter young fish drew Mrs. Wellington down from her little sitting room where she dozed, watched television and paged through books about gardening and thoroughbred dogs. She came blinking and padding down to the kitchen, lured by the smell of frying fish, the smell of a pleasure forbidden because it comes from a kingdom we dare not enter for long. I was certain she would be gruff – she was frowning, though only against the neon brightness of the kitchen. “What’s going on here?” she asked in what must have been at last the sound of her true voice, the poor, flat intonations of the prairies where she’d grown up. Soon she was pouring out tall glasses of milk and setting places for us. She was a good sport in an unselfconscious way I’d never seen in a grown-up before, as though she and we were all part of the same society of hungry, browsing creatures instead of members of two tribes, one spontaneous and the other repressive. She seemed to bend naturally to the will of her son, and this compliance suggested an unspoken respect for the primacy of even such a young and scruffy man. My own mother paid lip service to the notion of male supremacy, but she had had to make her own way in the world too long to stay constant to such a purely decorative belief.

  After the midnight supper Tommy started to play the guitar and sing. He and I had trekked more than once downtown to the Folk Center to hear a barefoot hillbilly woman in a long, faded skirt intone Elizabethan songs and pluck at a dulcimer or to listen, frightened and transported, to a big black Lesbian with a crew cut moan her basso way through the blues. The People – those brawny, smiling farmers, those plump, wholesome teens bursting out of bib overalls, those toothless ex-cons, those white-eyed dust bowl victims – the People, half-glimpsed in old photos, films and WPA murals, were about to reemerge, we trusted, into history and our lives.

  All this aspiration, this promise of fellowship and equality, informed Tom’s songs. We worried a bit (just a bit) that we might be suburban twerps unworthy of the People. We already knew to sneer at certain folk singers for their “commercial” arrangements, their “slickness,” their betrayal of the heartrending plainness of real working folks. Although we strove in our daily lives to be as agreeable and popular as possible, to conform exactly to reigning fads, we simultaneously abhorred whatever was ingratiating. We were drawn to a club where a big, scarred Negro with lots of gold jewelry and liverish eyes ruminated over a half-improvised ballad under a spotlight before a breathless, thrilled audience of sheltered white teens (overheard on the way out from the newly elected president of our United Nations Club: “It makes you feel so damn phony. It even makes you Question Your Values”).

  Of course, the best thing about folk music was that it gave me a chance to stare at Tommy while he sang. After endless false starts, after tunings and retunings and trial runs of newly or imperfectly learned strums, he’d finally accompany himself through one great ballad after another. His voice was harsh and high, his hands grubby, and soon enough his exertions would make the faded blue workshirt cling to his back and chest in dark blue patches. Whereas when he spoke he was evasive or philosophical, certainly jokey in a tepid way, when he sang he was eloquent with passion, with the simple statement of passion. And I was, for once, allowed to stare and stare at him.

  Sometimes, after he fell asleep at night, I’d study the composition of grays poised on the pale lozenge of his pillow, those grays that constituted a face, and I’d dream he was awakening, rising to kiss me, the grays blushing with fire and warmth – but then he’d move and I’d realize that what I’d taken to be hi
s face was in fact a fold in the sheet. I’d listen for his breath to quicken, I’d look for his sealed eyes to glint, I’d wait for his hot, strong hand to reach across the chasm between the beds to grab me – but none of that happened. There was no passion displayed between us and I never saw him show any feeling at all beyond a narrow range of teasing and joking.

  Except when he sang. Then he was free, that is, constrained by the ceremony of performance, the fiction that the entertainer is alone, that he is expressing grief or joy to himself alone. Tom would close his eyes and tip his head back. Squint lines would stream away from his eyes, his forehead would wrinkle, the veins would stand out along his throat and when he held a high note his whole body would tremble. One time he proudly showed me the calluses he’d earned by playing the guitar; he let me feel them. Sometimes he didn’t play at all but just sounded notes as he worked something out. He had forgotten me. He thought he was alone. He’d drop the slightly foolish smile he usually wore to disarm adolescent envy or adult expectation and he looked angry and much older: I took this to be his true face. As a folk singer Tom was permitted to wail and shout and moan and as his audience I was permitted to look at him.

  His father invited me to go sailing. I accepted, although I warned him I was familiar only with powerboats and had had no experience as a crew member. Everything about dressing the ship – unshrouding and raising the sails, lowering the keel, installing the rudder, untangling the sheets – confused me. I knew I was in the way and I stood, one hand on the boom, trying to inhale myself into nonexistence. I heard Mr. Wellington’s quick sharp breaths as reproaches.

  The day was beautiful, a cold, constant spring wind swept past us, high towers of clouds were rolling steadily closer like medieval war machines breaching the blue fortress of sky. Light spilled down out of the clouds onto the choppy lake, gray and cold and faceted, in constant motion but going nowhere. Hundreds of boats were already out, their sails pivoting and flashing in the shifting beams of sunlight. A gull’s wings dropped like the slowly closing legs of a draftsman’s compass.

  At last we were under way. Mr. Wellington, unlike my father, was a smooth, competent sailor. He pulled the boat around so that the wind was behind us and he asked me to attach the spinnaker pole to the jib sail, but I became frightened when I had to lean out over the coursing water and Tommy filled in for me, not vexed at me but, I suspect, worried about what his father would think. And what was I afraid of? Falling in? But I could swim, a rope could be tossed my way. That wasn’t it. Even my vertigo I had overcome on the seawall for Tom’s sake. It was, I’m sure, Mr. Wellington’s disapproval I feared and invited, that disapproval which, so persistent, had ended by becoming a manner, a way of being, like someone’s way of holding his head to one side, something familiar, something I would miss if it were absent. Not that he bestowed his disapproval generously on me. No, even that he withheld and dispensed in only the smallest sums.

  The wind blew higher and higher and Mr. Wellington, who’d taken in sail, was holding close to it. We gripped the gunwales and leaned back out over the cold, running waves, the water brushing, then soaking the backs of our shirts. The sun solemnly withdrew into its tent of cloud, disappointed with the world. By the slightest turn of my head I could change the moan of the wind into a whistle. There we were, just a father and his teenage son and the son’s friend out for a sail, but in my mind, at least, the story was less simple. For I found in this Mr. Wellington a version of myself so transformed by will and practice as to be not easily recognizable, but familiar nonetheless. He had never been handsome, I was certain, and his lack of romantic appeal shaded his responses to his glamorous son, the muted, wary adoration as well as the less than frank envy.

  I’d begun to shiver. The day was turning darker and had blown all the birds out of the sky and half the boats back to harbor. I was huddling, hugging myself down in the hull, wet back to the wind. Mr. Wellington was letting out sail – the tock-tock-tock of the winch releasing the mainsheet – and he was looking at me, holding his judgment in reserve. Between us, these two tight minds, flew the great sail and Tom haunting it as he leaned back into it, pushing it, pushing until we came around, he ducked and the boom swung overhead and stopped with a shocking thud. Here was this boy, laughing and blonded by the sun and smooth-skinned, his whole body straining up as he reached to cleat something so that his T-shirt parted company with his dirty, sagging jeans and we – the father and I – could see Tom’s muscles like forked lightning on his taut stomach; here was this boy so handsome and free and well liked and here were we flanking him, looking up at him, at the torso flowering out of the humble calyx of his jeans.

  It seemed to me then that beauty is the highest good, the one thing we all want to be or have or, failing that, destroy, and that all the world’s virtues are nothing but the world’s spleen and deceit. The ugly, the old, the rich and the accomplished speak of invisible virtues – of character and wisdom and power and skill – because they lack the visible ones, that ridiculous down under the lower lip that can’t decide to be a beard, those prehensile bare feet racing down the sleek deck, big hands too heavy for slender arms, the sweep of lashes over faded lapis-lazuli eyes, lips deep red, the windblown hair intricate as Velázquez’s rendering of lace.

  *

  That summer I spent with my father; I worked the Addressograph machine and I hired a hustler, who was as blond as Tommy. When I returned home to my mother I was a bit smug – but also frightened by the tenacity of my homosexual yearnings.

  One fall evening Tom called me to ask me if I’d like to go out on a double date. He’d be with Sally, of course, and I’d be with Helen Paper. Just a movie. Maybe a burger afterward. Not too late. School tomorrow. Her regular date had come down with a cold.

  I said sure.

  I dashed down the hall to tell my mother, who in a rare domestic moment had a sewing basket on her lap. Her glasses had slid down to the tip of her nose and her voice came out slow and without inflection as she tried to thread a needle.

  “Guess what!” I shouted.

  “What, dear?” She licked the thread and tried again.

  “That was Tom and he arranged a date for me with Helen Paper, who’s the most beautiful and sophisticated girl in the whole school.”

  “Sophisticated?” There, the thread had gone through.

  “Yes, yes” – I could hear my voice rising higher and higher; somehow I had to convey the excitement of my prospects – “she’s only a freshman but she goes out with college boys and everything and she’s been to Europe and she’s – well, the other girls say top-heavy but only from sour grapes. And she’s the leader of the Crowd or could be if she cared and didn’t have such a reputation.”

  My mother was intent upon her sewing. She was dressed to go out and this, yes, it must be a rip in the seam of her raincoat; once she’d fixed it she’d be on her way. “Wonderful, dear.”

  “But isn’t it exciting?” I insisted.

  “Well, yes, but I hope she’s not too fast.”

  “For me?”

  “For anyone. In general. There, now.” My mother bit the thread off, her eyes suddenly as wide and empty and intelligent as a cat’s. She stood, examined her handiwork, put the coat on, moved to the door, backtracked, lifted her cheek toward me to peck. “I hope you have fun. You seem terribly nervous. Just look at your hands. You’re wringing them – never saw anyone literally wring his hands before.”

  “Well, it’s terribly exciting,” I said in wild despair. My sister wasn’t home, so I was alone once my mother had gone – alone to take my second bath of the day in the mean, withholding afternoon light permeating the frosted glass window and to listen to the listless hum of traffic outside, in such contrast to my heart’s anticipation. It was as though the very intensity of my feeling had drained the surroundings of significance. I was the unique center of consciousness, its toxic concentration.

  I was going out on a date with Helen Paper and I had to calm myself by then becau
se the evening would surely be quicksilver small talk and ten different kinds of smile and there would be hands linking and parting as in a square dance you had to be very subtle to hear called, subtle and calm. I wanted so badly to be popular, to have the others look back as I ran to catch up, then to walk with my left hand around his waist, the right around hers, her long hair blown back on my shoulder, pooling there for a moment in festive intimacy, a sort of gold epaulet of the secret order of joy.

  I had spent so much of my childhood sunk into a cross-eyed, nose-picking turpitude of shame and self-loathing, scrunched up in the corner of a sweating leather chair on a hot summer day, the heat having silenced the birds, even the construction workers on the site next door, and delivering me up to the admonishing black head of the fan on the floor slowly shaking from left to right, right to left to signal its tedious repetition of no, no, no, and to exhale the faintly irritating vacillations of its breath. No, no, no – those were the words I repeated to myself, not with force but as a Jesus prayer of listless grief. Energy in itself is a sort of redemption. No wonder we admire Satan. But if the Devil were listless, if he were a pale man in his underwear who watched television by day behind closed venetian blinds – oh, if that were the Devil I would fear him.

  That’s what Being Popular seemed to promise, a deliverance from the humiliation of daily life, its geological torpor, the dailiness that rusts the blade of resolve and rots the stage curtain, that fades all colors and returns all fields to pasture. Being popular was equivalent to becoming a character, perhaps even a person, since if to be is to be perceived, then to be perceived by many eyes and with envy, interest, respect or affection is to exist more densely, more articulately, every last detail minutely observed and thereby richly rendered. I knew that my sister wasn’t popular, at least not at school. She sat at home night after night and no matter how she styled her hair or wore her skirts she looked unliked, dowdy with dislike.